Quotes & Sayings About Debugging

Programming allows you to think about thinking, and while debugging you learn learning. — Nicholas Negroponte

Linux provides programmers with everything they need: libraries, compilers, and debugging/development tools. These features are included in all standard Linux versions. — Andrew Johansen

If you're as clever as you can be when you write it, how will you ever debug it? — Brian Kernighan

But in a pinch, he was a capable coder too. He just wasn't especially fast. So when he was finally done coding and debugging his program and ran a successful test, it was past eleven on Tuesday night. He hadn't slept but for a few hours on Sunday night, and the lack of sleep had cooked him. — Matthew FitzSimmons

The most frequent complaint is that it's hard. True. it's a hard game to win Also, many people ask me how to use the secret debugging commands, apparently under the impression that I'll tell them. — Graham Nelson

In debugging, errors are seen not as false but as fixable. This is a state of mind that makes it easy to learn from .6 Multiple passes also brought a new feel for the complexity of design decisions. — Sherry Turkle

The Core Debugging Process
The core of the debugging process consists of four steps:
Reproduce:
Find a way to reliably and conveniently reproduce the problem on demand.

Report erratum Prepared exclusively for castLabs GmbH this copy is (P2.0 printing, February 2010)
FIRST THINGS FIRST 18
Diagnose:
Construct hypotheses, and test them by performing experiments until you are confident that you have identified the underlying cause of the bug.
Fix:
Design and implement changes that fix the problem, avoid intro- ducing regressions, and maintain or improve the overall quality of the software.
Reflect:
Learn the lessons of the bug. Where did things go wrong? Are there any other examples of the same problem that will also need fixing? What can you do to ensure that the same problem doesn't happen again? — Paul Butcher

Huh. Programming. Debugging. It wasn't Lincoln's favorite, but it beat archiving and compressing. At least it was a problem to solve. And it would only be for a few months, maybe less. — Rainbow Rowell

The three most important aspects of debugging and real estate are the same: Location, Location, and Location. — Richard E. Pattis

Early Apple machines
don't know how to answer what it was like since there were so few tools. Just had to keep debugging by isolating a problem, looking at memory in the limited debugging (weaker than the DOS DEBUG and no symbols) patch and retry and then re-program, download and try again. And again ... — Bob Frankston

The most effective debugging tool is still careful thought, coupled with judiciously placed print statements. — Brian Kernighan

Another effective [debugging] technique is to explain your code to someone else. This will often cause you to explain the bug to yourself. Sometimes it takes no more than a few sentences, followed by an embarrassed "Never mind, I see what's wrong. Sorry to bother you." This works remarkably well; you can even use non-programmers as listeners. One university computer center kept a teddy bear near the help desk. Students with mysterious bugs were required to explain them to the bear before they could speak to a human counselor. — Brian Kernighan

What kind of programmer is so divorced from reality that she thinks she'll get complex software right the first time? — James Alan Gardner

Rushing to optimize before the bottlenecks are known may be the only error to have ruined more designs than feature creep. From tortured code to incomprehensible data layouts, the results of obsessing about speed or memory or disk usage at the expense of transparency and simplicity are everywhere. They spawn innumerable bugs and cost millions of man-hours - often, just to get marginal gains in the use of some resource much less expensive than debugging time — Eric S. Raymond

Each new user of a new system uncovers a new class of bugs. — Brian Kernighan

As soon as we started programming, we found to our surprise that it wasn't as easy to get programs right as we had thought. Debugging had to be discovered. I can remember the exact instant when I realized that a large part of my life from then on was going to be spent in finding mistakes in my own programs. — Maurice Wilkes

But the interesting cases are those where the conflict remains obstinately in place however much we ponder the problem. These are the cases where we are tempted to conclude that "intuition cannot be trusted." In these situations we need to improve our intuition, to debug it, but the pressure on us is to abandon intuition and rely on equations instead. — Seymour Papert

System debugging, like astronomy, has always been done chiefly at night. — Fred Brooks

Testing proves a programmer's failure. Debugging is the programmer's vindication. — Boris Beizer

Debugging tip: For server applications, be sure to always specify the -server JVM command line switch when invoking the JVM, even for development and testing. The server JVM performs more optimization than the client JVM, such as hoisting variables out of a loop that are not modified in the loop; code that might appear to work in the development environment (client JVM) can break in the deployment environment (server JVM). — Brian Goetz

And I was just there, less than an hour ago, debugging subroutines in my cubicle, when a motherfucking Earth Defense Alliance shuttle suddenly shows up and lands right outside my office building! I figured I must be losing it. Now I'm not sure what to think. — Ernest Cline

System debugging has always been a graveyard-shift occupation, like astronomy. — Fred Brooks

I do as much debugging as possible on the Mac, but I occasionally must debug problems in the PC world, which is significantly slower. — Robert Patterson

The hardest part of the software task is arriving at a complete and consistent specification, and much of the essence of building a program is in fact the debugging of the specification. — Fred Brooks

Remember, though, that debugging is as much art as it is computer science [..] — Michael A. Vine

There has never been an unexpectedly short debugging period in the history of computers. — Steven Levy

The wages of sin is debugging. — Ron Jeffries

After the debacle of the party, debugging the code running in his own brain was bliss. His body lay safely in his bed. His mind exulted inside the Nexus development environment, tracing the events that had led to the fault. Here he was in his element. — Ramez Naam

If debugging is the process of removing software bugs, then programming must be the process of putting them in. — Edsger Dijkstra

Debugging: what an odd word. As if "bugging" were the job of putting in bugs, and debugging the task of removing them. But no. The job of putting in bugs is called programming. A programmer writes some code and inevitably makes the mistakes that result in the malfunctions called bugs. Then, for some period of time, normally longer than the time it takes to design and write the code in the first place, the programmer tries to remove the mistakes. — Ellen Ullman

If you're good at the debugger it means you spent a lot of time debugging. I don't want you to be good at the debugger. — Robert C. Martin

When debugging, novices insert corrective code; experts remove defective code. — Richard E. Pattis

The warmth and the soft glow of the tubes also attracted moths, which would fly through ENIAC's innards and cause short circuits. Ever since, the process of fixing computer problems has been known as debugging. — T.R. Reid

Treating your users as co-developers is your least-hassle route to rapid code improvement and effective debugging. — Eric S. Raymond

Science requires a society because even people who are trying to be good thinkers love their own thoughts and theories - much of the debugging has to be done by others. — Alan Kay

One of the headaches of high-tech test programmes is having to debug the test arrangements before you can start debugging the things you're trying to test. — Henry Spencer

Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it. — Brian Kernighan

The process of debugging, going an correcting the program and then looking at the behavior, and then correcting it again, and finally iteratively getting it to a working program, is in fact, very close to learning about learning. — Nicholas Negroponte

Building technical systems involves a lot of hard work and specialized knowledge: languages and protocols, coding and debugging, testing and refactoring. — Jesse James Garrett

If you want more effective programmers, you will discover that they should not waste their time debugging, they should not introduce the bugs to start with. — Edsger Dijkstra

When you see the right thing, do it - this may look like more work in the short term, but it's the path of least effort in the long run. If you don't know what the right thing is, do the minimum necessary to get the job done, at least until you figure out what the right thing is. To do the Unix philosophy right, you have to be loyal to excellence. You have to believe that software design is a craft worth all the intelligence, creativity, and passion you can muster. Otherwise you won't look past the easy, stereotyped ways of approaching design and implementation; you'll rush into coding when you should be thinking. You'll carelessly complicate when you should be relentlessly simplifying - and then you'll wonder why your code bloats and debugging is so hard. — Eric S. Raymond

Other people - store clerks, burger flippers, software engineers, the whole vocabulary of meaningless jobs that make up Life in America - other people just rely on plain old competition. Better flip your burgers or debug your subroutines faster than your high school classmate two blocks down the strip is flipping or debugging, because we're in competition with those guys, and people notice these things.
What a fucking rat race that is. — Neal Stephenson